


These victories (are cruel and sudden)

by Crazyamoeba



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Anger, Dark Tim Drake, Death and Revival, Gen, M/M, Undead, mentions of past violence, slight body horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-25
Updated: 2017-08-25
Packaged: 2018-12-19 21:43:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11906787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crazyamoeba/pseuds/Crazyamoeba
Summary: Tim always thought that Bruce would come to save him in the nick of time.Instead, he gets Batman, and he has long since been out of time.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I'm heaving all the stories from my tumblr to here, so these things are mostly still works in progress that I'm still working on.

The boy propped in the tall, creaking leather of the chair looked small, cold.

Smaller than Bruce ever remembered him being in life, and colder even than he had been in death.

He made no move to acknowledge Bruce, his lithe, heavy limbs frozen in place as if the ice still held sway, though his eyes slid towards Bruce’s form. Sluggishly, slowly. Dead leaves on a frozen pond. Never brown and dead, dried and crackling. Leaves taken prematurely, torn from their branches and frozen perfectly in their prime green, always so bright, and only a little cracked from their icy armour.

Tim’s eyes were the one thing that never really changed.

“Hello, Bruce.”

His voice had never been the same.

Imbued with the biting whisper of the most fiery, freezing air, the hush of death and the fragile, ringing echo of ice, it was always sharp and soft now. Never a single voice. Never only Tim, but always the singing, laughing echo of tinkling ice. The voice of the boy that was his not-son, backed up by the reverent and vicious giggling of minions carved from glass-thick frost. A shimmering, wavering echo of broken, mocking chimes.

The same poisonous echo which choked Ivy’s voice whenever she broke her silence.

Today though, it was soft and breakable, husky with the strain of weight that it could not support. Crackling ice under Bruce’s heavy, steel-tipped foot.

“Hello Tim.” He keeps his voice soft and level. Distress – sadness, anger, the acrid stench of bitterness – upsets the creature.

It bleeds in and out of the shadows that pool in the corners of the room, flitting through the edges of his vision. It makes no sound on the ice.

“I was waiting for you, Bruce.” Tim’s voice is fragile, wavering. The echoes that whisper behind his words are thirsty.

“I know you were, Tim.” Bruce allows his feet to gain another few inches over the ground between them. “I’m sorry.”

There is a small sound from the area where Tim’s face is. It’s soft, gasping. Once. A small, silver puff of air curls from out of that space, quickly snapped up and smothered by the darkness. The moon is weak here.

“I’ve been waiting for you for a really long time.” The voices tremble, breakable and never breaking.

He’d walked on broken ice for years. It had never let him fall into dark and freezing water.

“I’m sorry I kept you waiting so long, Tim.” His voice is quiet, choked off and strangled by the things he hadn’t done.

The things this boy had never asked him for. Things that had never left the lips of the child who was always there. The boy who was silent and shy, defensive of child-secrets that Bruce had made no effort to discover. The child who was there every time Bruce had turned around. The child with the large, dark eyes that made the speaking, the asking, unnecessary.

Child-secrets grow with the child. Neither can remain small and unnoticed forever.

If he were to stretch out his hand, he could touch the chair where Tim rests.

He’s never done this with this boy before. He’s not sure he quite knows how.

He’s never wanted to do so as much as he does now.

Wanting might not be enough now, though.

It had never gained Tim anything, and he had always worked so very hard at it.

The creature shifts, drapes its head over Tim’s thigh. A small, frail hand caresses its head.

“I have everything that I ever wanted.” The voice is tired like aging, groaning metal. Load-bearing sticks.

“I can have anything that I want.” A slow, screeching grind of metal that cannot hold. “And there is nobody to stop me.”

Tim has turned in his chair, bent forward in it, hands arched into claws over the armrests as his back bows over, those fragile twig-arms seeming to be the only thing keeping the stiff, frozen body from collapsing out of the chair. His eyes blaze like sun on ice. Small crystals frost his eyelashes.

There is bright, glaring and furious moisture that ripples there. Ice thawing against the bitter heat of the sun, and it trembles in his eyes as he hisses at Bruce.

“You can’t stop me, Bruce. You haven’t ever stopped me.” Those pale, frail arms tremble with the effort of supporting the stooped, angular frame which arches from the chair.

“So where were you Bruce? Hmm?” The humming sound echoes through the room, out of the door, into the deserted hallways. The tiny voices singing their mocking, tinkling tune. “Where has the champion of Gotham been?”

There is a cruel smile playing about those blue, thin lips, and the voice, weak and trembling before, is now full with bitter, knowing victory. The mirror-voices trail behind Tim’s words with delight.

“The defender of the city, the hero, always there to save the day and bring justice to the streets.” The ice that coats Tim’s skin crackles as he slithers further forwards, eyes dripping, burning into Bruce’s skin. He feels it prickle, sharp and cold like pinpricks through his body. A guilt that never stops.

“Where has he been, Bruce? Where’s he been, this defender of humanity, this paragon of all that is good and right? This hero, this saviour of the children and the helpless? Where was he?”

Tim’s cries are sharp and violent with a passion that Bruce had never once heard from the child who had shared his house and his life. The mirror voices swirl and dance, hissing and spitting behind him. Shards of glass falling, tinkling from Tim’s mouth and clashing, shattering all around them.

The creature flinches, ears flat on its head and creeping low on the ground, afraid and sad to hear pain in his master’s voice. The young ones draw back into the shadows, fearful and uncertain.

“Tell me, Bruce, where has that man been? Skulking in a cave? Hiding behind a big desk and a stupid alter-ego all because he once lost people that he loved. Because he thinks that he’s the only person ever to have lost something? Because he can’t ever let go of the things that are gone and the memories that obsess him to the point of madness, even when he is gifted with what should never be given to man, the return of what was lost.” Tim’s voice crackles and leaps like cold flame, rising higher and higher, threatening to engulf all in its path. His fury fills his lungs and the air with venomous hatred, regret. Truth that clouds the air in silvery puffs which fall between them like a toxic, freezing fog.

“A man so lost, so obsessed with what has been taken from him, that he forgets those he has sworn to protect?” The fire in his voice sputters, flickers. The voices die. Warm trails cut paths through the ice that dusts his soft, frozen cheeks.

Tim is the only one who has ever rendered him so perfectly incapable, so absolutely and inescapably helpless to do anything but stand and stare. The pain and regret, the overwhelming anger at his myriad failures has never been so acute, so encompassing as to render his whole body paralysed, as it is with Tim.

Harley, Ivy, Scarecrow, Bane, Penguin, even the Joker.

He had always had a voice with them. Always had the classic, comic book hero rebuttals ready and willing to trip off the tongue, a parry to every thrust that they could inflict. He had always had an answer. Because he had always known that he was right, no matter what his failures, and they were most certainly there with the others. But no matter what those failures, it always came down to a very simple thing in the end, and it is hard for even Batman to get it wrong when it’s such a simple thing.

A matter of justice. He was right, and they were wrong.

But Bruce was voiceless with Tim, his mouth locked half-open, trembling every now and then with half-words that died before living, choked off and strangled, because.

Because where was the justice here? Who was right, and who had been wronged, who deserved recompense, and who was going to provide it?

Tim had always been good at providing for himself.

“You’ve got no right.” Tim snarls, eyes glittering fiercely, as if piercing into Bruce’s thoughts and recoiling from what he found there.

“This - ” Tim lashes an arm out in an arc, motioning the treasures piled high, the creatures skulking in the dark. The forms encased in ice. No mere glass and empty uniforms this time. A full house. The complete set.

Congratulations. You win.

“All this. Is mine. I have it, I took it. I deserve it. Nobody else wanted it, it’s mine.” The fury and the moisture burn in Tim’s eyes, trickle down his face, which twists as it hisses at Bruce.

Bruce’s eyes flicker towards those icy cases. His throat burns.

There is a sudden, echoing stillness in the air. Bruce’s eyes snap back to Tim’s, which are wide and shimmering. There is a tug of – something in the very back of Bruce’s mind, barely there but persistent. Memory? Is this how Tim looked as a boy?

Was there ever a boy who looked so sad, so lost, so chokingly angry living in the manor. Had that ever happened?

Bruce doesn’t beg, but he will now.

Please. Please, don’t ever say that this boy had been allowed to live and work, sleep and eat by his side, in his house. Without anyone ever noticing. Those eyes.

“And you still can’t look at me.” Tim’s voice, when it crumbles out of his lips, is low and raw and terribly, eminently human. It is full, damp. Full of those child-secrets of long ago. Things grow, and they fill the spaces they are given. One boy’s lungs, never to share the burden. Nobody to siphon out the poison.

“You could always see them, and they could always see you. They saw him.” Tim spits the word, and his creature flinches low to the ground once more, sidling up to his side, crawling low on its belly, wanting to stand tall. Wanting to comfort.

“They saw him, this hero, this bringer of justice. Gotham’s saviour. They saw him, and he saw them.” Tim quivers, and the thought that he might want to stamp his foot doesn’t make Bruce want to smile.

“Well I never did! And now you still won’t look at me.”

Tim’s voice tears at his throat on the way out, lashing into Bruce’s skin, leaving him burning. The ice that cleaves to the walls, enveloping his children – the rest of his children – breaks and splinters, at the mercy of Tim’s fury as fine, gossamer webs of cracks bolting like lightning from Tim’s feet all the way up to the ceiling. A blast of frigid, freezing air tears around the room, radiating out from Tim’s frail, bird-like body and whirling around each wall, shattering the ice like glass, throwing thousands of tiny, blade-like shards out into the air and onto the ground, a lethal, stinging rain that cuts through even the Batsuit. Bruce feels nothing pierce his insides, and knows that despite all appearances to the contrary, Tim has exercised the greatest control he is capable of.

Father’s privilege, he supposes.

Unasked-for mercy that others were never even considered for.

Tim’s chest heaves, a parody of life that he still clings to. His body crumpled in the chair, a husk bowed in upon itself.

“Take them, Bruce.” He motions to the damp, shuddering and shell-shocked but unarguably, remarkably unharmed forms of Dick, Damian and Jason.

“They’re no good to me.”

Bruce is once more left to stand, helpless as his silence condemns them both and unable to find words that were both kind and true, or at the very least not unkind and not untrue.

What do you say to the boy who knows he was forgotten? The boy who could never have known that he was loved once he was gone.

There is a wet, choking sound from the other side of the room, and for a moment, Bruce thinks that he is losing Tim all over again, before he sees that Tim’s body has stiffened, his head slowly turning to stare in the direction of Jason’s slumped, soggy form.

He is slowly crawling onto his knees, shaking off the remaining shards of ice. He stares up at Bruce from behind lank, frozen hair, barely able to support himself on hands and knees. His words are choked with a thick and bitter fury.

“Bruce. I swear to fucking God, Bruce, if you don’t look him the eyes right the fuck now, I will end you.”


	2. I could look at you forever (if it would make any difference now)

Jason’s eyes are burning into his own, a scathing, living mirror of the cold and lifeless fury that burn from Tim’s, and Bruce doesn’t know what to do anymore.

 

There is only one thing he can do.

 

He obeys Jason, his middle child, his child that was lost and found. Returned.  
He shifts his gaze from the man staggering to his feet and onto, into and all around the dead and milky eyes of the only child to be truly lost. The only one to remain unfound, despite all the breadcrumbs.

 

The cloudy film that had settled over those wide eyes long ago did nothing to dull the pain, the fury that was sinking underneath.

 

“That’s all he fucking wanted, B. That’s all he ever wanted from you, and even I could see it.”

 

Jason’s voice is quiet and scratchy, barely audible over their end-game stare but somehow being the only thing holding it together.

 

“I could see it even when I hated him. When I came back and he was just some skinny little pretender slipping right into the space I’d left. Taking you away from me even though I was back.”

 

Tim’s sluggish eyes roll to rest on Jason’s face, and there is a faint and fragile crackling in the air. The stiffness of unyielding eyelids being forced to widen.  
There is a rare cessation of the sounds of splintering and groaning that echoes around the ice that seems to grow and sway and die and fall like a huge, breathing entity living out its lifetimes around them.  
The pause sounds like what might pass for patience from one who has already run out of time.

 

Jason swallows past the still-thawing, prickling ice in his throat and stares at Bruce as though the weight of that alone might make him see. Might make him look back far enough and remember what he had quite possibly never seen in the first place.

 

“I used to hate him when he looked at you, B. I used to hate seeing it. Because every time I saw him stare after you with those goddamn pathetic puppy eyes, all I could think was ‘that was how I must have looked.'”

The absolute silence and stillness from the creatures feels like a permission that is fraught with peril.  
But then again, Jason was entirely familiar with peril and had never had much time for permission. Still, it felt like a concession when he quieted his words and none of the feeling behind them.

“I thought, 'Jesus, did I ever really look that fucking pathetic? Did I ever really hang off your every word and gesture, every fucking smile? Did I ever really scrape and grovel and just fucking straight up beg with my fucking eyes like that?'”

Tim’s eyes are dead and blind now, but not even a heartbeat could make their heavy focus more intense and uneasy to stand under. Bruce wasn’t sure whether to be glad that their attention was elsewhere for now, or whether to be horrified that they were so fixed on such a damning report that the only thing keeping them there must be either anger or a slow, sickening recognition.

“And then I realised.” Jason’s smile is twisted and wounded and there is nothing but the thickest, blackest humour there. Tim’s nerveless, frozen face stares at Jason with a rage that should not be within the reach of dead things.

The ice under their feet groans, spider-web cracks frisson from beneath.  
Bruce sees Dick’s arms clumsily clasp Damian closer to him, dragging his unresistant form closer to his chest and away from the dead, frozen things that stare at them from the corners of the room.

“I never looked at you the way he did.” Jason’s smile is almost gentle and there is nothing that Bruce wants more than for this moment to end.

“I never had to look at you the way he did, because you always saw me. You always saw me looking. You always felt me looking even if you were across the other side of the room. You seemed to…to fucking feel my eyes on you, even when I was trying my hardest to stab you in the fucking back with the power of my mind when you were being a stubborn asshole. And you would always turn around. You would always look at me, even when I didn’t want you to.”

And now the twisted thing that is trembling on Jason’s face bears no resemblance to the smile that had almost survived, and Bruce almost feels better for it.

Smiles are meant for other nights and other families. Theirs is not the smiling kind.

“I never had to look at you like I would crawl through broken glass just to get you to acknowledge that I deserved my place in your house.”

There is a huff of laughter that dies in a small, silvery puff of air as soon as it escapes.  
“I never had to call it 'your house’. I never had to stare at you for so goddamn long that my fucking eyeballs nearly dried up in my face.”

Tim’s milky eyes flicker, seem to falter for a moment for the first time, as if called back to a memory of their former, relentless vigil. The one which, at the end of it all, had never got him anything he wanted.

And so now Bruce was left looking at a child who had taken everything he had ever wanted. Because nobody gives an emancipated child what they want. What they never ask for.  
But a child who could make people watch as everything they had ever cherished struggled and failed to hold onto life? A child who could never be touched, never be hurt, never die because it was all far too late for that?

People would give that child everything he asked for and whatever he didn’t.

Tim’s lips set in their slack anger, and his eyes hardened, cold and unyielding. His eyelids never once flickered as his gaze smoothed over from Jason’s hissing and settled like nightfall on Bruce’s face.

“I never had to spend every single fucking day looking at your back, staring at it so hard and just hoping, willing, praying that today would be the day that you would turn around and just fucking notice me.”

“I never had to know that even when you had to look at me, even when you had to turn my way because there were too many people around, that your eyes would skate all around my face like you couldn’t quite remember what it was, but you would still never look at me.”

Jason is breathless with an anger that chases on the heels of hindsight.  
And Tim is too, because he will always be breathless. But this time there is true movement there. The only part of his body that gives anything away is his withered, concave chest as it slowly, sluggishly draws air that seems to be far too heavy, in and out of punctured, empty lungs.

A body desperately struggling to be real once more. A body helplessly remembering what it is like to be so captive to an anger it thought long gone.

Jason is whispering now, tenderly and gently as if trying to soothe a boy who is beyond that now. He stares at Tim as if trying to make up for lost time.  
And Tim, as if trying to mimic it, only has eyes for Bruce. Jason’s words are soft and swirling, buffeting against them all like cold, corrosive snowdrops.

“I never had to meet your gaze and see that even in the one or two seconds that you could stand to meet my eyes, you would give anything to either be somewhere else, or to be looking at someone else.”

“I never had to try so fucking hard, Bruce. I was allowed to fuck up, screw up and screw around and I would always get what I wanted from you. I tried because I wanted to. Not because I felt like I had to. Not because I felt like that was the only reason I was allowed near you, and the only way I might ever get more from you.”

There is a deep, resonant sound of breaking, and Bruce’s left foot has to slide across the ice to stop himself from falling.

“Stop.”

It’s the first time Tim has opened his mouth since Jason started talking, and the soft, calm puff of air is like the last breath of something dying, the gentle sound of strangled gasps being taken by a cold, biting breeze.

Bruce wonders whether sounds like those were trapped forever in the last second of Tim’s life that he never witnessed. Whether they are held captive in Tim’s throat, in his smashed chest, forced to replay and relive that night every time he speaks, every time he breathes.

Or whether it is something that Tim can dismiss and recall at will. Every time he breaks his his silence. Every time he forces frozen, artificial air between his lips. Whether it is something done out of spite.

Something, perhaps the only thing, that he can do to hurt them now.

Because Bruce never got to hear the last damp, shallow breath leave Tim’s lips.  
But he thinks that hearing him draw breath now is infinitely worse.

 

“Timmy.”

The voice is soft and torn and Bruce wishes that it would stay silent. Once upon a time he thought that hearing Dick’s voice might help Tim. Soothe him. Make him see the madness in his method.

“Timmy,” the deep voice is so rich that it seems to come straight from a room and a time when Tim didn’t know what emancipated was, and when black and blue-striped gloves made his heart race faster and his face captive to a stupid smile.

“Timmy, baby…” Tim’s eyes move more quickly than Bruce would have thought possible for dead tissue. They also shine beneath the shadows with a pain that should have been nothing but a faint and abstract memory by now.

His lips thin and somehow the twitching of muscle misses bitterness and rage and has landed straight at a deep, aching sadness that hurts to see. Because all is decidedly not fair in love and war, and Dick always was a great one for being exquisitely unfair only when he is trying his hardest not to be. At his most painful and punishing only when he is at his most loving.

“What have you done? My baby brother, what have you done?” Dick’s arm is outstretched and Tim stumbles toward it on wasted, splintered legs as if called by a higher power.  
His shuffling, clumsy legs give out, and as ever they have brought him almost within reach. Within touching distance. Close but never enough.

Dick’s hand trembles where it is held, suspended in the air so close to Tim. The fingers tremble as he tries to reach from underneath Damian’s slumped weight and his own broken ribs. His tears are clear and hot and audible in his catching, sobbing breaths.  
His tears, his pain, like the man himself, never ashamed to be loud and honest.

By all rights, it should have been Dick that was the odd bird out in their nest of closed and silent beaks.  
And yet for some reason it had always been the one who had most lived up to their expectations. The one with the most unspoken, the most left unsaid. The one with the calmest eyes that held everything that would never leave his lips.

The silent watcher. The quiet son.

He had tried so. Damn. Hard.

And it had always left him outside the nest looking in. Inside the belfry looking out.

Tim’s own lips stretch and tremble in a horrible sympathy with Dick’s own, and Bruce isn’t quite sure whether it is simply a grimace through the tears or an awful kind of smile.

His breath seems to be hitching and it sounds like the soft, quiet laughter that was missing from the manor. His own hand reaches up, forms a space between his fingers and Dick’s own searching, grasping ones.

He leans forward like the space between a kiss, and now there is most definitely laughter, Bruce can hear it carry on the breeze and see it run and leap and reach and finally fall in the space between himself and Dick. His mouth is as wide open as his eyes and the laughter is rhythmical and gasping, popping from a broken chest. Too much, too loud for the silent bird and there is nothing there but a hysteria and desperate sadness so alive and human that it sounds like it comes from living tissue with a chance to be fixed.

“I’m sorry, Tim. There’s nothing I can do. I can’t fix it, and I’m sorry.” Tim’s head bows with a creak, and his hollowed, broken body shakes as it curls as close to his brother as possible.

Tiny, silvery clouds spasmodically filter into the air from behind the matted hair, clumped with old blood, water and detritus from Gotham harbour, frozen like beads in the tangled strands.

The small body convulses, racked so hard that it starts to fall, to cave in on itself.  
One pale and withered hand falls to Dick’s leg, spindly, sharp claws resting softly against the warmth beneath the leather, propping up his failing form.

An involuntary, shameful hiss leaves Dick’s mouth, soft and guileless and the last thing he would have wanted Tim to hear, despite the black, ashy stain eating into his flesh, pouring like shadows from the points where cold, forgotten skin touches warm, living flesh.

Tim’s head jerks up at the sound, and a knife-edged part of Bruce is pleased that there is still humanity untouched by rage somewhere in his ruined child.  
Because the look of absolute horror and despair that seeps into Tim’s face at the sight of death catching up with his eldest brother, is all-consuming and heartfelt as the bitter anger had been.

A small, broken whimper escapes his lips as he snatches his purple, blood-clotted fingertips away from his brother’s skin. Watches with disgust and despair at the source of his power and his comfort. Watches as the wasting, creeping disease retreats without the anchor of his touch.

Realises – perhaps for the first time since the first night he woke up in the same spot that he had left the world – what dark and terrible things have been given to him.  
These are the gifts that he has been given after his years of unrecognised effort, toiling and sweating and failing, failing, always failing in a desperate bid to become perfection.

This is the reward he has been given.  
He can take whatever he wants now, and this rotting, creeping sickness is how he will pursue his happiness. 

This is the only thing he will ever be good for.

All he can do now is end lives. He isn’t meant to save them anymore.

And for a moment all is still as his face freezes in static horror. His eyes stare at the sickness as it fades like week-old bruising.

Stare as Dick’s hands clutch Damian tighter, pulling him away.

Darkness sweeps over Tim’s face. His features harden as his eyes slowly settle on the young, barely-conscious boy’s face.

There is something glowing and glinting with a fierce sharpness beneath the cataracts, and Dick’s face crumples like bones hitting hard water.

“Please.” He whispers, as Tim’s fingers ghost over the hair’s breadth of air between his fingertips and Damian’s face.

The sickness doesn’t seem to mind the gap, arcing through the air like sparks.  
The very tips of shadows dance across the boy’s damp face, tripping and chasing after the movements of Tim’s fingers as he traces them above the contours of Damian’s face.

“Please.”

And suddenly Tim’s hand stills, the sickness pulsing and fading, retreating and regaining as his hand trembles with the effort of staying aloft, but he pays it no mind as those hideous, searching eyes have once again found Bruce’s, because this time Dick wasn’t the only one to beg.

“You plead for him?” Tim’s eyes are wide, voice fragile and wispy with dangerous pain and something that sounds like shock but surely can’t be now.

“You plead for your son? Did you plead for me? Did you ever plead for me, Bruce?”

The shards of ice that have been allowed to colonise every corner of the city are splintering, leaving fine, glinting shards to drift through the air, and they crackle obscenely in the silence.

“I stopped breathing, Bruce.” Tim’s eyes are focused, wide and bright.

In life they had always been blank and calm. Eyes that even Dick had found it difficult to fall in love with.

Now he could barely stop himself from recoiling from them, and the feeling of shame and cowardice reminded him of all the times he wished he could have undone his failures. It made him wish that he hadn’t fought Tim too hard. Made him wish he could accept what his poor, dead baby brother wanted to do.

It almost seemed churlish to refuse. Surely Tim deserved to get something from life.   
Especially after it had vacated the premises with nothing more than what Tim had managed to steal for himself with greedy, cunning fingers.

But somehow this normal, human brightness shining underneath the foggy cataracts seemed so wrong now. Too little and far too late, looking far too much like a mockery of life. 

A clumsy undertaker’s paint staining sallow skin and hollow eyes.

“I stopped breathing. All I could see was the sky. I couldn’t move my head.”

And Bruce wishes selfishly that Tim would stop, because his voice is cracking, breaking under the weight of the tears and the sinking, consuming and creeping fear that comes from laying, dying on the ice of Gotham harbour.

Fear. The last thing that he had ever felt, and it’s like a recording of the moment when he stopped breathing, when the blood had filled his lungs and his spine had splintered and given.

It’s like a voicemail that he will never be able to get rid of, a broken record playing over and over and he won’t, he can’t ever let this go and so neither should anybody else and Bruce…Bruce is so tired.

It’s like hearing an echo of the boy he had once been. Even if it had been the last few seconds of boyhood.

It’s old, so old and the same thing over and over again. And yet it’s new and horrifying, because apart from this grotesque parroting, this parody of his final minutes, Bruce doesn’t think he ever remembers hearing Tim cry.

And now he’s seeing it and hearing it linger in the back of the boy’s memory-voice and he suddenly wishes that he had remained an ignorant father.

“I could still hear, Bruce.”  
The thin, boyish voice cracks and the loyal creatures that surround them bare their rotting, broken teeth in sympathy.

“And I never heard you coming. I never heard you pleading. I kept thinking that you would come.”

The recollection is high and shivery, the echoes that are a constant companion in his throat pitching the misery to wavering, delirious heights.

There is a small smile between the memory of tears on Tim’s face, and it is hopelessly fragile and wobbly as muscle memory seems to remind Tim of the tattered, shabby cloak of invincibility that Robin had once worn.

“'Robin doesn’t die’ – that’s what I said to myself.” Tears turning to icy dust the moment they escape on a laugh that floats from the swollen smile.

Jason stares, hard and unwavering at Tim’s back, at his crouched and broken form.

“I’m not going to apologise, pretender. I won’t. I can’t.” His voice is low and unwavering at Tim’s back. Uncompromising.

“If it would help you, if it would undo all this shit, if it would give you back your heartbeat and mend your bones, then yeah, Christ, I would be on my knees to you right now.”

There is a kind of bitter thickness to Jason’s words.

“But it can’t. So I won’t.”

A soft and tender whisper, soothing and as close to Tim’s ear as Jason can get without being impaled by the splintering, glistening tendrils that sluggishly curl from the ground to twine around Tim’s feet.

Waiting, listening, and Bruce has seen how fast those icy ropes can grow from nothing. How they can dart and snap through the air quicker than a blink, and now this is what passes for patience with Tim.

With the boy who had sat for years in his home, their home and their refuge in the rocks and smiled politely and bowed out gracefully on all of the occasions they had never actually asked him to.

And Bruce is trying so hard that it hurts, to remember whether he – they, but they are all his children and he is the father who is supposed to see through it all and they are supposed to take their cues from him, because otherwise what the hell is Bruce Wayne to anyone – whether he had simply not seen (not looking, not looking and you still won’t look at me) or had seen all too well beneath the blind eye, how much desperate, yearning rage had lived inside his child.

The quiet child. The Robin who could always be trusted to think. To look, and to listen. To wait.

To wait, and to wait, and to wait because…that was all he had needed. Just a little time. Always a little time. And then he would see. They would all see. They would all one day turn their heads and see…see the brother, the son, the Robin that was always there. That would never fail, never give up.

One day they would see the light coming from those eyes, and they would hear the rage and the bitterness tearing at those still lips.

They would see, and then it would be good.

One day.

One more day.

One more day that never came. And now he was making up for lost time.

Time, the one thing that no longer mattered to him. The one thing that he could finally steal, take with force, make his own.

The one thing he could never get, and one of the many things that he had never been given.


End file.
